What’s in a Name?

There are often serious difficulties in establishing
with accuracy what had been the name of certain railway
stations. On the Underground, one of the more
troublesome examples
is that station known today as Gloucester Road. I would
not care to say with certainty what its correct name
was during its first forty years. Brompton?
Brompton-Gloucester Road? Gloucester Road-Brompton?
Gloucester Road? Glo'ster Road? Or was it some other combination
of these names, with varying combinations of brackets,
commas or hyphens? Indeed, it begs the question about what
'correct' name actually means. Is it the name on the
signs, the tickets, the timetables, the official
government returns? Even these clues assist us little
when we see differing names on station signs, and different names on
tickets sold the same day; timetables are
also inconsistent in their spelling, sometimes in
different places in the same edition. Fortunately, profound
variation and inconsistency is confined to a relatively
small number of stations and where this is important the histories that need to refer to them
can explain all this. I
mention the problem of identifying 'correctness'
generally, simply to show that what is 'right' or
'wrong' can sometimes be a matter that is not so easy to
establish and that to claim there is but one definitive
name is perilous and glosses over a more interesting and
informative background. What I seek to do in this essay is
to go into one small area of this, which is the
deployment of the apostrophe in certain District Railway
station names.

St James’s Park

The first station to attract my attention is what
today we call St James's Park. The evidence, such as it
is, suggests that when opened in 1868 this was also the
name of the station, and so it remained for some years.
Evidence includes several 'official' maps of the
District Railway during the 1870s and engineers'
drawings of about 1866 origin.

However, there later began a practice of omitting
the final 'S'. It is difficult to put a date on this
but staff timetables show the name in this reduced form as
early as 1884 and other indications suggest that it was
common during the 1890s and (as far as I can see)
pretty universal by the time of electrification.

Above are two District tickets, the top one 1880s
(with apostrophe s) and the lower one just after
electrification (after the dropping of the final s). On the right is a view of the westbound platform at
St James's Park around the mid 1890s. Visible at left
are (for some reason) two station nameboards, the one of
the left displaying apostrophe s and the one to its
right omitting it. Presumably the one on the left is
somewhat older.

Above are two maps, the first around 1900, without
final s, and the other one an Underground diagram
roughly half a century later. The Underground diagram
not only omits the final s but drops the apostrophe
too.

The above pictures illustrate exterior shots outside or near the station.
On left are signs at west end of Dacre Street in July
1898. In centre is the Palmer Street entrance in 1916.
At right is the main entrance in September 1952. All
end with the apostrophe but without a following s.

On the left is a photo of one of the station bullseye
signs of the type installed 1922-24 and integral with
the flat enamel plate attached to the wall. This uses
the version with apostrophe but without a following
s.
On the right is a London Transport ticket circa 1950
and omitting both apostrophe as well as following s.

You can see from these images that for half a
century or more the evidence suggests, fairly
consistently, that the 'official' station name was St
James' Park, though the apostrophe was sometimes
omitted altogether. The name survived the period during
which it could hardly fail to have been subjected to
the forensic scrutiny of Frank Pick who was evidently
not troubled by it.

It seems that in 1950 or
thereabouts there was a change of heart. The station
namesigns were plated over by new blue namebars reading
St James's Park and maps, tickets and other publicity
were quickly brought into line (one sign on the
eastbound platform has in recent times had the bar removed and shows the
unamended name. I gather this was deliberate in order
to show a sign in original condition). The adjusted
name appeared from the January 1951 Underground
diagram.

Origin of St James's
Park
The station is obviously named after the nearby
park, but how did the park become named? We can
trace the name to St James the Less, to whom was
dedicated a small leprosy hospital (an
institution for fourteen leprous maidens) on a
site half of a mile or so north-west of
Westminster Abbey. Leprosy was sadly all too
common after the Norman conquest and houses were
constructed outside the town walls where those
affected were
confined in the belief this was necessary to avoid
the disease spreading. This one was certainly in
being by the year 1189. Under the hand of Henry
VIII, this establishment became the site of a
royal palace (which continued the association with St James)
and the land to the south, which was emparked at
the same time, also adopted the name, after the
palace.

The question arises as to why the final s
in the name of the station was
dropped for over 50 years in the first place. We all
know that one of the main purposes of the apostrophe
s is to represent the so-called possessive
case, in this instance suggesting that St James's Park
represents the Park of St James (more particularly it
was the park of the palace of St James, which carried
forward the dedication to that saint from the earlier
hospital). In any event the station was named after the
park and by mid-Victorian times the usual spelling of
the park was St James's. I cannot imagine in later
Victorian times fighting amongst the grammarians about
the correctness of any of this. There is no doubt that
the station name did alter to a consistent James' spelling
in or around the 1890s and this was most
likely the result of someone disliking the fussy
spelling of a name some pronounce as "James-ez", but by
no means everyone. Some just say 'Saint James Park'
irrespective of the spelling.

At this point you may care to note the plan of park,
above, c1707, before the apostrophe had caught on.

Since the apostrophe is a relatively recent
innovation I suppose we are entitled to ask how the
name of the area was pronounced before the apostrophe
s was added. Since we know that very old, pre-apostrophe maps
print the name simply as 'James', I suppose that was
how it was pronounced a couple of hundred years ago.
Should we change the way the name is pronounced in more
recent times, just because of a codification of the use
of the apostrophe as a written indicator of meaning (only in
special cases, such as words ending in s, would the
question of sounding an apostrophe arise)? But
many people have: "James-ez" is a common way of
pronouncing the place. This creates the circular
argument, that if it is pronounced "James-ez" then it
must be spelt "James's". Well, someone working for the
District Railway 120 years ago was happy to ditch the
final s and presumably did so because it was
not felt necessary..

But to omit the final s is wrong, some will say. Is
it? And who says?

Well, for the station name to last without the final
s for half a century or more would seem to me
weak evidence for being 'wrong', taking the usual
meaning of the word, though for the spelling to be out
of correspondence with that of the adjacent park might be
thought odd. Going into the subject, it seems evident
that the process of gaining consistency in the way the
apostrophe is deployed in written English was not
really complete until the middle of the nineteenth
century and although there is general acceptance for
most of the 'rules' which we still use there are
instances where complete agreement has not been
obtained. The Oxford Companion to the English Language
laments that there never was a golden age when the
apostrophe was used with consistency and notes that one
of the troublesome areas is where singular nouns end
with a sybillic (strongly sounded) s. Several
authorities and numerous style guides fully recognize
there is a 'problem' but vary as to how to deal with
it. There are those that say add apostrophe s
as with any other noun. Others say add only an
apostrophe (with no final s) in the case of
proper nouns, othewise as normal. I have examples to
hand recommending the final s should be omitted where
it would not normally be voiced, with a variant where
this only applies to longer words. Some would omit the
final s only with certain words 'of
antiquity', the name Jesus being an example. None
condemns the alternative possibilities as they all
recognize there appears to be an issue, and each
strives merely for consistency. My copy of Fowler's
English Usage (from 1965) acknowledges it was once
common, where a noun ended in s, simply to add
an apostrophe, but was now less so.

I make these observations merely to suggest that to
say that those who claim the use of the form "James'
Park" is actually wrong are probably on thin ice but
that fashions have changed. Somehow I doubt I will find
an answer to exactly why our late Victorian forebears
uniformly selected this form, and I am not sure we will
discover why at some expense the spelling was changed
in 1951.

Earls Court

If the apostrophe s in St James's Park is problematic, it is naught
compared with
the inconsistencies in usage of an apostrophe in
Earls Court. The problem at Earls Court was not
especially of the District's making since the area
itself observes Earls Court spelt both with and without
an apostrophe s, with notable inconsistency, and has done
for a century or more.

The Ordnance Survey (the government's mapping agency,
or OS) mapped the area at around the
time the District was built and adopted the spelling
that included the apostrophe. The OS always tried to
record names correctly but as language was spoken and
written records were not necessarily plentiful (nor
themselves accurate and consistent) this could be
difficult. What, anyway, would be a 'correct' place
name, let alone a 'correct' spelling, particularly of
somewhere of little importance (the Earls Court area
was virtually undeveloped in the 1850s and early 1860s).

Earls Court is located in Kensington and the earl being
referred to is the earl of Oxford, who shortly after the
conquest was lord of the manor of Kensington and whose
court (manor house) happened to be near today's station
building. It must be said that the manor had become
detached from the earldom by 1610, so in the two and a
half centuries between that date and the mapping of
local names by the OS, the name Earls Court clung on by
tradition (there being not much else in this thinly
populated area to offer up an alternative name). The
apostrophe had barely been introduced to Britain at
the time the earl had moved on and its development was volatile and not deployed to
any commonly understood standard until the end of this
period either, so we can be fairly certain that the
Earl's Court spelling variant cannot possibly have been
in use while the earl was around. The earliest OS map I
have noted using it is the 1850 town plan at 1:5280 scale (1 ft
to the mile).

There are earlier maps than those of the OS. A turnpike
trust map of 1790 by R. Roberts shows this area in
detail and Earls Court is shown with no apostrophe (see
map to right), and
neither does Cary's map of 1787. Nor does Rocque's map
of 1761 (though he does not appear to use the
apostrophe anywhere). Mogg's London in Miniature of
1806, Davies's post office map of London 1856 and
Laurie's Map of London 1837 also shun the apostrophe.
There were a few maps in early Victorian times where
the apostrophe can be found but it is apparent that it
was first used consistently by the OS and this would
have given it a certain authority (whether warranted or
not). It is perhaps of interest that the plans
deposited with Parliament for obtaining the District's
1864 Act show the Earls Court area without use of
apostrophe. I do not know who produced the base map
upon which the railway was superimposed.

I doubt if many people had heard of Earls Court
until the District Railway arrived in 1871 and
we cannot now be certain how that company spelt the
name since (as far as I know) no photographs exist that
show the original station (which was on the east side
of Earls Court Road). When the station moved over the
road to the west side in 1878, the name outside
and the platform signs included the apostrophe.
Whether this was influenced by OS mapping practice or
not we do not know. The
1883 staff timetable uses the apostrophe, but not that
in 1901. On the other hand, District maps of varying
periods from 1871 to the period of electrification do
not include the apostrophe, make of that what you will.
The images below show an 1871 map (no apostrophe), an
1890s photo showing the building including one and a
late Victorian platform view showing a seat sign with
the apostrophe.

When the station was rebuilt in 1905 the external
name (fired into the tilework) did not include an
apostrophe, and neither did the platform names of the
Piccadilly platforms when opened the following year.
Indeed, with one or two inexplicable exceptions, it
seems that all signage installed throughout the rest of
the District's life, and extending throughout the
1950s, also omitted the apostrophe, including all the
standard London Transport bullseye signs first
installed during Frank Pick's reign. I cannot possibly
identify any one specific cause of this, beyond the
obvious one that, prior to the twentieth century, usage
was inconsistent and someone attempted to standardize
the spelling and saw no compelling reason to insert an
apostrophe. As at St James's Park, the fact that the
'Earls Court' spelling was pretty consistent for sixty
years and didn't give rise to rioting in the streets
seems evidence enough that it was not causing anyone a
problem. The no-apostrophe spelling carried across to
posters and the Underground diagram and most other
publicity produced by the organization.

The above images show various presentations of the
name from 1905 and later where it is used consistently
with no apostrophe.

The 1951
Underground diagram gifted Earls Court with an
apostrophe and as with the spelling change at St James's Park,
there was limited follow through with publicity items
such as posters and timetables. There was no immediate
move to change the station nameboards.

However in the early 1960s (I am led to believe
1962) most of the signs at Earls Court were replaced
overnight, or plated over with a similar one including
the apostrophe. The enormous running-in boards at the
east end were not altered (and have remained unaltered)
probably because it would have involved a track
possession at the time. Exactly why this expensive
exercise was embarked upon I do not know for sure, but
I am led to believe it was at the instigation of
Michael Robbins who seemed to have a problem with the
name being presented as it was. He was then Chief
Commercial and Public Relations Officer. Today, therefore, the station name has
an apostrophe wherever it is employed. You will see
that the station has now enjoyed a period of continuous
apostrophe use that matches the similar, previous,
period when it was consistently not used.

There are always going to be some oddities and in
the case of Earls Court it was the tickets. For some
strange reason apostrophes were not added to ticket
names, either in 1951 or after the signs were changed
in 1962.
Here is a 1966 ticket from the station but the lack of
apostrophe continued into yellow ticket days.

Kensington
(later Kensington & Chelsea) council appears to have an
inconsistent approach to the name which has varied over
time. I still cannot tell what the preferred version
is. Examples above. Of course, this uncertainty is then
transmitted throughout the community, which uses both
variations of the name. The exhibition hall invariably
spelt name without apostrophe, which perhaps influenced
usage until its sad demoltion recently. It appears
London Buses is unimpressed by the Underground's use of
the apostrophe and chooses not to acknowlege the apostrophe itself
when referring to the station. The apostrophe in bus
destination blinds for Earls Court has for many years
been absent but over last 25 years or so appears much
more frequently but still inconsistently.

On the basis of all this it would be rash to say that
TfL has a discernable policy, or perhaps it has but the
staff and contractors are not clear what it is. London
Transport latterly had a practice (policy is much too
grand a word) for Underground use but less obviously so
for buses, whilst LT in earlier years (and the
Underground before it) had for an equal number of years
adopted the opposite practice. Make of this what you
will. You will notice I do not write Earls Court with
an apostrophe. This is in part because I do not see
that apostrophes in well established place names serve
much purpose (see shortly for the problems they cause)
but more particularly I tend to spell using Oxford
practice and my copy of the OUP style guide (known as
Hart's Rules) explicitly commands Earls Court not
be given an apostrophe. That's good enough for me.

Barons Court

Here we have some more challenges. The station was named
after the adjacent Barons Court estate, which lies to the east of
the station and was developed by Sir William Palliser.
I cannot be certain beyond all doubt that the estate
did not have an apostrophe in it but unless anyone
knows better I am supposing that the instrument of
development was Barons Court Ltd. Both Board of Trade
recorded title and London Gazette record of striking
off (in 1930) have the name without an apostrophe.

Having said that, there are countervailing arguments for
suggesting the apostrophe was used, such as
advertisements for estate property, the usage in the contemporary history 'Fulham old and New'
(1900) and the name of the road comprising the Northern spine. The ordnance Survey would have us
think this has always been Baron's Court Road, and this is the name given in the 1902 Post Office Guide
and in the London County Council's list of streets from 1928.
Moreover it is what most of the street signs claim (it
is too much to hope this would be all of them).

However, we are speaking of a station built by the
District Railway, and since I believe it to be settled
territory that by 1905 the District did not care for
apostrophes, I am not sure the company was bothered
whether the estate used one or not: either way it was
not District practice and nobody seems to have been
bothered. The matter is unlikely to have been reviewed
until the London Transport purists were awoken in 1950
and evidently concluded that Earls's Court should have
one but Barons Court need not. I won't weary readers
with any more about Earl's Court but a quick review
about the Barons Court position is probably called for,
and how the outcome seems a bit peculiar. It is the
more peculiar in that both stations were named after
nearby physical properties and the only difference between
them is that one was several hundred years old and the
other very much newer. Why not treat them the same way?
Of course, today, we see all around us great huffing
and fussing about very old things without giving a care
to anything current (though 'current' will become old
one day, if it survives) so therein might lie the
answer — Earls Court was 'historical' while Barons Could didn't matter. If that is not
the answer, are we supposed to conclude that sensible
London Transport Officers have actually wasted time
exhaustively examining the complete
etymology of both names? Seems unlikely.

The Earls Court story I have given already. All I know
about the name Barons Court is that most derivations
are highly speculative. For example one such unsubstantiated story
relates to it being named after Palliser's Irish
Estates. What estates are these then? There is a
remotely-linked estate, Castletown (in Wexford), after
which one of the roads is named, so it isn't that.
Several sources, all identical in their fatuous
wording, suggest it was named after Baronscourt, a vast
estate in Tyrone (Northern) Ireland. This is
nowhere near where Palliser came from and there appears
to be no connection whatever. The parish status Baronscourt estate
is that of the Duke of Abercorn who
also appears to have had no connection whatsoever with
the Fulham area (except that certain of the lowest
class of online genealogy sources claim the first
duke died in Baron Court, Fulham, when in fact it was
his ancestral home, Baronscourt, in Ireland). Nor is the
theory it is related to the Court Baron of the manor of
Fulham very convincing, the lord being the Bishop of
London, based in his palace near the Thames. Why would
the estate be named after that? The palace is 1½ miles
away, hard by Fulham village, yet Palliser's estate is
build on agricultural land remote from anything much,
bar North End which is ill-located from the centre of
Fulham affairs. Unless someone can demonstate the Court
Baron was regularly held near West Kensington (which is
not in Kensington), then I go for the theory that in the
absence of any topographical feature to name it after,
it was simply found an amusing name to give a large
estate that sat in contrast to Earls Court on the other
side of the West London Extension Railway and about as
far removed from it. If that be the case then perhaps
they should have the same number of apostrophes in
their respective names!

Almost for amusement I show below the current OS large
scale plan for Barons Court station. Yes, it has an
apostrophe in it, and I find all OS plans of the
station over the last century have it. Further
evidence, if needed, that the OS is not to be trusted
as a reliable source of apostrophe usage.

General
Observations

Observations about two stations, St James's Park and Earls Court, are
given because the District Railway vacillated about
their spelling and eventually determined a consistent
approach which in neither case accords with expected current practice. The only other station they
owned that invites question is Parsons Green. Lysons'
Environs of London (1795) states that the name arises
from its proximity to the parsonage house (long since
disappeared) in which was ensconsed the rector of
Fulham. Lysons asserts an alternative but less well
known name of Parsonage Green. I am not at all sure
that this derivation is materially different from that
of Earls Court — both places are ostensibly named
after an office-holder's property. Curiously the OS also blessed the place
with an apostrophe, visible on the 1894 1:1056 large
scale plan, but then seems to have thought better of it,
as it is omitted on the 1950 equivalent. Anyway the
District was never inclined to use the apostrophe here
and neither did London Transport.

I suppose it is worth pointing out that the Underground
group, and then London Transport, do seem to have had
an aversion to the apostrophe and if one looks at
Beck's first diagram, not one station has an apostrophe
in it. This is not a Beck 'thing', for the station
nameboards shunned apostrophes as did other publicity
material, and Stingemore's earlier diagrams did not use
them either. At least policy was clear.

What is odd are the 1951 changes. Aside from the St
James's Park issue, apostrophes appeared in the names
Earl's Court, Collier's Wood, King's Cross, Shepherd's
Bush, St Paul's and St John's Wood too. This change was
quickly reflected in other publicity, but at that stage
it does not seem that signs were altered. Other than
Barons Court, already dealt with, stations that
were not altered were: Rayners Lane, Parsons Green,
Golders Green, Canons Park and Bounds Green. In each
instance there was at least an arguable case for
employing an apostrophe, some having a stronger case
than others. Of all these, the name Golder's Green was
used on early Underground publicity but the apostrophe
was lost around 1912 and never reappeared.

The Central London Railway used apostrophes in
Shepherd's Bush and Queen's Road but acquisition by the
Underground Group quickly put a stop to it. The Met had
only two opportunities, at Rayners Lane and St John's
Wood and came up with a different approach in each case
(though early inconsistency is observed). Why, is not
apparent. It remained St John's Wood until London
Transport got its hands on the place and the new
station was also built with with signage omitting the
apostrophe. Today it is peculiar in that it bears an
apostrophe on the diagram but (I think all) platform
signs omit it as it is a heritage station and signs are
in 1930s style.

This all seems rather messy.
It is also, I think, potentially rather inconvenient.

In these electronic days the fact of a name change having
happened, or of inconsistent use of apostrophes, does
actually come at a price. With either people or computers
word-searching documents and databases, the consistent
use of spelling is crucial or you will miss what you
are looking for. By way of example you can go to the LT
Museum's photographic database and try looking up St
James Park, St James' Park and St James's Park. The
numbers of images pulled out are respectively 228, 187
and 173 photos, but it is worse than that as some
images in the 173 are not in the 228 selection.
Moreover if you
cut and paste the name you search on from a document
you might get no images presented at all! This is
because only
the straight keyboard apostrophe is recognized and not
the curly one (a superscript comma) that word
processors employ. Sorry, this is hopeless!

It is the same problem at Earls Court (and no doubt
other stations). Check once more the LT Museum photos
for Earls Court. Spelt with an apostrophe there are 97
entries and without there are 172 entries (with some in
the 97 that are not in the 172). Again the problem it
causes electronic systems needs to be considered and
even TfL's journey planner seems preoccupied about the
correct use of the apostrophe for the station name but
not in the road name outside. This is not helpful and
the issue must exist all over the place wherever a database is used.

Some local councils have decided to drop apostrophes in
place names because of the problem it causes the
emergency services using electronic databases to plan
the fastest route, often in bad light and in a hurry.
If the database uses the apostrophe (or not) in a way
the driver does not expect,
there can be a problem.

I mention all this as an extension to District Railway
history as their (apparent) view that apostrophes were
unnecessary in established place names is just
beginning to gain traction again. I do not have an
answer to what London Transport thought it was doing
after the War in changing some but not others, and I am
not sure, with the benefit of hindsight, whether what
they have wished upon Londoners has ultimately been
very helpful. If I get more information, I will
certainly share it.